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The new evidence concerning the altered document, which pertained to the FBI's FISA court warrant application to surveil Page, is expected to be outlined in Horowitz's upcoming report. CNN first reported the news, which was largely confirmed by The Washington Post.

But the Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved worked "beneath" Peter Strzok, the FBI's since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.

"The person under scrutiny has not been identified but is not a high-ranking official — they worked beneath former deputy assistant director Peter Strzok, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss material that has not yet been made public," The Post wrote in its now-deleted paragraph.

Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts

A watchdog report will portray the pursuit of a wiretap of an ex-Trump adviser as sloppy, but it also debunks some accusations by Trump allies of F.B.I. wrongdoing.

WASHINGTON — A highly anticipated report by the Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to sharply criticize lower-level F.B.I. officials as well as bureau leaders involved in the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation, but to absolve the top ranks of abusing their powers out of bias against President Trump, according to people briefed on a draft.
Investigators for the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, uncovered errors and omissions in documents related to the wiretapping of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page — including that a low-level lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap, the people said.
Mr. Horowitz referred his findings about Mr. Clinesmith to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge. Mr. Clinesmith left the Russia investigation in February 2018 after the inspector general identified him as one of a handful of F.B.I. officials who expressed animus toward Mr. Trump in text messages and resigned about two months ago, after the inspector general’s team interviewed him.
Though Mr. Trump’s allies have seized on the messages from Mr. Clinesmith and his colleagues as proof of anti-Trump bias, Mr. Clinesmith has not been a prominent figure in the partisan firefight over the investigation. His lawyer declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Mr. Horowitz.
More broadly, Mr. Horowitz’s report, to be made public on Dec. 9, portrays the overall effort to seek the wiretap order and its renewals as sloppy and unprofessional, according to the people familiar with it. He will also sharply criticize as careless one of the F.B.I. case agents in New York handling the matter and say that the bureau and the Justice Department displayed poor coordination during the investigation, they said.
At the same time, however, the report debunks a series of conspiracy theories and insinuations about the F.B.I. that Mr. Trump and his allies have put forward over the past two years, the people said, though they cautioned that the report is not complete. The New York Times has not reviewed the draft, which could contain other significant findings.
In particular, while Mr. Horowitz criticizes F.B.I. leadership for its handling of the highly fraught Russia investigation in some ways, he made no finding of politically biased actions by top officials Mr. Trump has vilified like the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey; Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy who temporarily ran the bureau after the president fired Mr. Comey in 2017; and Peter Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent.
The early accounts of the report suggest that it is likely to stoke the debate over the investigation without definitively resolving it, by offering both sides different conclusions they can point to as vindication for their rival worldviews.
The wiretap of Mr. Page emerged as a political flash point in early 2018, though it was one relatively narrow aspect of the sprawling inquiry that found that Moscow sought to help Mr. Trump win election and that his campaign expected to benefit, but found insufficient evidence to charge any conspiracy with the Trump campaign.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who oversaw legal matters related to the 2016 election, asked Mr. Horowitz to scrutinize the wiretap and broader issues related to the investigation, absorbing pressure from Mr. Trump and his allies.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first approved wiretapping Mr. Page, who had close ties to Russia, as a suspected unregistered agent of a foreign power in October 2016, after he had left the campaign.
The Justice Department obtained three renewal orders. The paperwork associated with the renewal applications contained information that should have been left out, and vice versa, the people briefed on the draft report said.
The email Mr. Clinesmith handled was a factor during the wiretap renewal process, according to the people. Mr. Clinesmith took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding.
Mr. Clinesmith included this altered email in a package that he compiled for another F.B.I. official to read in preparation for signing an affidavit that would be submitted to the court attesting to the facts and analysis in the wiretap application.
The details of the email are apparently classified and may not be made public even when the report is unveiled.
The investigators’ referral of its findings on Mr. Clinesmith went to John H. Durham, a prosecutor assigned by Attorney General William P. Barr to also re-examine the Russia case and its origins. The referral from Mr. Horowitz’s team appears to be at least in part the basis for the elevation of Mr. Durham’s inquiry from an administrative review to a criminal investigation, the people said.
Additionally, Mr. Clinesmith worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia investigation. He was among the F.B.I. officials removed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after Mr. Horowitz found text messages expressing political animus against Mr. Trump.
Shortly after Mr. Trump’s election victory, for example, Mr. Clinesmith texted another official that “the crazies won finally,” disparaged Mr. Trump’s health care and immigration agendas, and called Vice President Mike Pence “stupid.” In another text, he wrote, in the context of a question about whether he intended to stay in government, “viva la resistance.”
In a June 2018 report by Mr. Horowitz about that and other politically charged texts, which identified him as “F.B.I. Attorney 2,” Mr. Clinesmith said he was expressing his personal views but did not let them affect his official actions.
The inspector general apparently did not assert in the draft report that any of the problems he found were so material that the court would have rejected the Justice Department’s requests to continue surveilling Mr. Page. But the people familiar with the draft were uncertain about whether Mr. Horowitz said the problems were immaterial, or instead avoided taking a position on that question.
CNN first reported that the draft accused a lower-level lawyer of altering a document. Mr. Clinesmith’s identification and details about the findings have not previously been reported.
In a phone call to “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Mr. Trump played up the initial revelations to claim that “they were spying on my campaign and it went right to the top and everybody knows it and now we’re going to find out” and “they tried to overthrow the presidency.” The accounts of Mr. Horowitz’s findings do not support that assertion.
And in other crucial respects, the draft inspector general report is said not to corroborate conspiracy theories and insinuations offered by Mr. Trump and his allies about the early stages of the Russia investigation, before Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel and took it over.
For example, the draft report also concludes that the F.B.I. had enough evidence to meet the legal standard for opening the investigation, though Mr. Horowitz emphasized that the bar is low, the people said.
The report is also said to conclude that Joseph Mifsud, a Russia-linked professor who told a Trump campaign official that Russia had damaging information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of hacked Democratic emails — a key fact used to open the investigation — was not an F.B.I. informant. That undercuts an assertion of conservative critics of the inquiry.
None of the evidence used to open the investigation came from the C.I.A. or from a notorious dossier of claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats, the report concludes, according to the people briefed on it.
Mr. Trump’s allies have complained about how the Justice Department used information from the Steele dossier in the wiretap applications. Along with evidence from other sources, the filings cited some information from Mr. Steele’s dossier about meetings that Mr. Page was rumored to have had with Kremlin representatives during a trip to Russia that year.
Republicans have criticized any use of political opposition research in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretaps, which are among the most intrusive tools investigators have and are highly regulated. But the people briefed on the draft said Mr. Horowitz does not criticize them for the basic fact that they used the information.
Still, people familiar with questions asked by Mr. Horowitz’s investigators have suggested that he is likely to conclude that the filings exaggerated Mr. Steele’s track record in terms of the amount of value that the F.B.I. derived from information he supplied in previous investigations. The court filings in the Page wiretap application said his material was “used in criminal proceedings,” but it was never part of an affidavit, search warrant or courtroom evidence.
But it remains unclear what other judgments Mr. Horowitz is preparing to render about related disputes related to the use of Mr. Steele’s information in the surveillance materials.
The wiretap applications contained a lengthy footnote telling the judges that Mr. Steele’s research was believed to have been commissioned by someone seeking information that would damage the Trump campaign. But it did not specifically identify the funders — the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
The original October 2016 application said investigators did not know the identity of Mr. Steele’s patrons. But even in 2017, after they specifically learned that Democrats paid a research firm to unearth material that could hurt Mr. Trump, law enforcement officials did not update the language in the renewal applications.
Defenders of the bureau’s inaction argued that the original footnote was sufficient to alert the surveillance court that Mr. Steele gathered the information in a political context and noted that it is standard practice to keep names of individual Americans or organizations out of such documents.
It also remains unclear what the inspector general concluded about Mr. Steele’s contacts with Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department official. Mr. Ohr, an expert on Russian organized crime and himself a frequent target of Mr. Trump, spoke with Mr. Steele several times after the F.B.I. terminated its relationship with him. Mr. Ohr briefed the bureau about those conversations. His wife also worked for the opposition research firm that hired Mr. Steele.
In his comments to Fox on Friday, Mr. Trump appeared to be looking past Mr. Horowitz’s report and potentially anticipating its complex findings. “Perhaps even more importantly,” he said, “you have Durham coming out shortly thereafter.”

Former FBI Lawyer Accused of Altering Document to Obtain a FISA Warrant for Carter Page Surveillance

Justice Department officials are saying that a lawyer for the FBI altered a key document that was then used in the application for a FISA warrant to initiate surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign.

DOJ Inspector General David Horowitz is expected to release his report on FISA warrant abuses by the Obama administration on December 9. No doubt, this incident will figure prominently in that report.

Interestingly, the Washington Post originally reported that the lawyer worked for Peter Strzok, the FBI's disgraced former head of counterintelligence and notorious anti-Trump investigator who, along with his mistress Lisa Page, played a key role in the bureau's Russian collusion investigation.

According to Fox News, the Post later dropped references to Strzok.

The Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved was underneath Peter Strzok, the FBI's since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.

While the exact nature of the alteration isn't known, PJ Media reported earlier that U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said, "If there was an FBI agent, who has sworn to uphold the Constitution, who can be proven to have altered a document in connection to a legal proceeding including the attaining of a FISA warrant, that's really serious. It doesn't get much more serious than that."

Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee who modified the FISA document falsely stated that he had "documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis" for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly "altered an email" to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.

In its initial 2016 FISA warrant application, the FBI flatly called Page "an agent of a foreign power."

The Post tried to downplay the alteration as "not central to the legality of the FISA warrant obtained against Page." Without knowing the exact substance of the alteration, how the hell do they know?

There is no doubt now that Attorney General Willian Barr's concerns that the investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 was tainted by politics were legitimate. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has never been charged with a crime despite the secret surveillance, and he and other members of the Trump campaign have filed several lawsuits looking to clear their names.

The document in question wasn't the only piece of evidence that was altered.

Newly released text messages involving text messages between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page revealed that Page -- who was not present for the Flynn interview -- had apparently made "edits" to the so-called "302" witness report in the case, which was key to Flynn's prosecution on a false statements charge. Page told Strzok on February 10, 2017 that she “gave my edits to Bill to put on your desk.”

The myth that the FBI and other federal law enforcement officials could put aside their personal anti-Trump biases and conduct an honest, "professional" investigation has been shattered. The lot of them should have recused themselves from any investigation involving Trump and the campaign. The problem is that the bias infected the entire upper echelon of the FBI and Justice Department.

It would be hard to conduct an investigation when the bosses are the corrupt ones.

Blockbusters Buried In The IG Report On FBI Misuse Of Confidential Sources

Last week, the leaks began in anticipation of the expected early-December release of the inspector general report on the propriety of the Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance order. CNN broke news on Thursday that “a former FBI lawyer is under criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document” related to the 2016 FISA applications.

The press and public are understandably consumed with this news—which is huge if true—but while speculating on that forthcoming report, the media has ignored several significant revelations already detailed in the report Inspector General Michael Horowitz released last week.

That report, issued on Tuesday, summarized the results of the inspector general’s audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Confidential Human Source (CHS) validation processes. While the media reported the main takeaways summarized in the IG’s press release—that the FBI did not comply with attorney general guidelines and that the current process for validating these sources lacked adequate controls—there were four potential blockbusters buried in the 63-page report.

Burying Evidence to Keep It from the Courts

The most startling revelation in the audit concerned how the FBI handles problems with a CHS’s credibility or accuracy. The report first noted that “validation documents relevant to the credibility of a CHS may be discoverable in judicial proceedings,” explaining that:

Discovery in criminal cases is controlled by case law and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. For example, information in the validation report which refers to the CHS’s motivation or vulnerabilities may be discoverable pursuant to Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) or Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972). ‘Brady’ refers to information known to the government that is material to a criminal case and could tend to exculpate the defendant. ‘Giglio’ refers to information that could be used to impeach a witness for the prosecution.

Then the IG detailed that its investigation revealed several troubling steps the FBI took to avoid the mandates of Brady and Giglio.

We were told by multiple Intelligence Analysts that they received guidance to only state the facts and not to conduct analysis, report conclusions, and make recommendations in the Significant Source Review Panel validation reports. For example, one Intelligence Analyst told us that he was permitted to recommend a CHS receive a polygraph or operational test to the handling agent by phone but not permitted to document the recommendation in the CHS’s validation report. Additionally, multiple FBI officials told us that they believe that field offices do not want negative information documented in a CHS file due to criminal discovery concerns and concerns about the CHS’s ability to testify. For example, one FBI official told us that some U.S. Attorney’s offices will not use a CHS at trial if there is negative documentation in the CHS’s file.

These admissions should outrage Americans: The FBI is intentionally failing to document confidential sources’ credibility and reliability problems so defense attorneys do not learn of them! Or, as the IG report concluded, “by withholding potentially critical information from validation reports, the FBI runs the risks that (1) prosecutors may not have complete and reliable information when a CHS serves as a witness and, thus, may have difficulties complying with their discovery obligations.”

Leslie McAdoo Gordon, a D.C.-based criminal defense attorney and principal at McAdoo Gordon and Associates, branded the FBI’s failure to document issues in a CHS’s validation report a form of evidence tampering. “This ‘what they don’t know won’t hurt them’ attitude is cultural,” McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist. “Like all cultural problems, this is caused by a failure of leadership.”

McAdoo Gordon added that “the integrity of our criminal justice system is seriously damaged when investigations are grounded on information that is biased or dishonest and those problems, moreover, are hidden from the defendant’s advocate and the court.” Unfortunately, there is nothing a defense counsel can do, McAdoo Gordon noted, because they don’t know it’s happening.

Affects Future Knowledge of New FBI Agents

Moreover, as the report makes clear, the failure to document a CHS’s credibility or reliability problems also has future ramifications “because handling agents change and new handling agents can only know the risks if they are documented.” This lack of documentation may also deprive future handling agents “of relevant information about the CHS that could not only jeopardize an investigation but also put the agent’s safety and potentially sensitive information at risk,” as the IG report explained.

While these aspects of the IG’s audit raise serious concerns in all criminal cases involving CHSs, these findings directly bear on the FBI’s use of Christopher Steele as a CHS in the Page FISA applications. In the Page FISA applications, after noting that it had suspended Source #1, now known to be Steele, for making “unauthorized disclosure of information to the press,” the government stressed that it still assessed Steele “to be reliable as previous reporting from Source #1 has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.”

But what about previous reporting by Steele that was contradicted or refuted? Or what about previous credibility or reliability issues? Did the FBI insist such negative information be excluded from Steele’s “validation reports” to keep his file clean? We will likely never know.What About Steele’s Sub-Sources?

Relatedly, the IG’s audit of confidential human sources reveals that the FBI did not maintain validation reports for sub-sources, defined in the report as individuals “who directly acquire[] information that is then provided to the FBI by an FBI CHS.” That omission raised myriad additional problems and concerns.

Specifically, according to the IG report, “Delta,” which “is the FBI’s official electronic record-keeping system for CHS management,” “does not identify and track extraterritorial sub-sources.” As such, the CHS system “will lack complete and accurate information on its CHS coverage stemming from extraterritorial sub-sources.”

That the FBI’s electronic record-keeping system for CHS management does not identify and track extraterritorial sub-sources adds even more concerns to the already overabundant problems plaguing the FBI’s Page FISA applications. Recall that the FISA applications “relied heavily on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims,” and that “the bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier.”

And remember that the dossier consisted, not of information acquired directly by Steele, but of information Steele claimed to have heard from a litany of unnamed sources. In other words the dossier was a summary of sub-source assertions. Yet nowhere in the dossier was there information establishing the reliability of the sub-sources—and courts hold that conclusory statements that informants are “believed to be reliable sources,” “standing alone without any supporting factual information, merit absolutely no weight . . . .”

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy was the first to identify this fatal flaw in the FISA applications, noting:

In applying for a warrant, the government must establish the reliability of the informants who witnessed the alleged facts claimed to support a probable-cause finding. Steele was not one of those witnesses. He is not the source of the facts. He is the purveyor of the sources — anonymous Russians, much of whose alleged information is based on hearsay, sometimes multiple steps removed from direct knowledge.

While the Steele dossier lacked any information bolstering the credibility of his sub-sources and sub-sub-sources, and thus any assessment by Steele that the Russian informants were credible would be entitled to no weight by the FISA court, there was always the possibility that Steele told the FBI the identity of his sub-sources and the FISA applications established that the sub-sources were reliable.

A Jane Mayer puff piece on Steele which The New Yorker ran more than a year ago painted a similar narrative. Citing “three former government officials familiar with” disgraced former FBI Director James Comey’s briefing of then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden, The New Yorker reported that Comey told the previous administration “the F.B.I. had not corroborated the details in the dossier.”

But, according to The New Yorker, Comey “also said that the F.B.I. had ‘confidence’ in the dossier’s author—a careful but definite endorsement—because it had worked not only with him but with many of his sources and sub-sources, whose identities the Bureau knew.” “He’s proven credible in the past, and so has his network,” The New Yorker reported Comey as saying.

The veracity of The New Yorker’s claims is uncertain, but following the IG’s report, we do know that multiple FBI offices keep “negative information” out of a CHS’s file, and that the FBI does not even bother to “identify and track extraterritorial sub-sources.” How, then, could the FBI possibly reliably attest to the veracity of Steele’s extraterritorial sub-sources?

Exempting Sources Like Steele from Routine Validation

A third important point gleaned from last week’s IG report on confidential human sources concerns the attorney general guidelines’ requirement that all long-term sources receive an enhanced validation every five years, except “those CHSs providing information for use in national security investigations or foreign intelligence collections.”

So, under the guidelines, while the FBI must seek and obtain the approval of the Human Source Review Committee (HSRC) every five years for most confidential sources, individuals, such as Steele, who feed the FBI unverified information from supposed foreign-intelligence collections are exempt. Not that a HSRC review would likely matter, in any event, since the HSRC must rely on the Annual Validation Reports and other relevant FBI documentation which, as the IG report revealed, intentionally omits negative information about CHSs.

When Reporters and FBI Sources Swap Info

A final tidbit from last week’s IG report raises an entirely distinct line of questions, but also relevant to the Page FISA applications and the broader question of the handling of the investigation into the Trump campaign. The IG notes in its audit that the AG guidelines “define special categories of CHSs,” including “media CHSs.” While the IG report does not discuss any issues specifically related to a media CHS, the reference to media CHSs spurs the question of whether the FBI used any media CHSs in its targeting of the Trump campaign and administration. If so, was there a quid pro quo: supposed intel from the CHS in exchange for leaks?

Here, a July 2018, story from Politico proves especially intriguing. In “Details Emerge on Justice Department Meeting with Reporters on Manafort,” Josh Gerstein highlighted two FBI memos that indicated the Associated Press obtained some information about former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort from the FBI. That meeting was “arranged” by Andrew Weissmann, then the chief of the DOJ’s fraud section, later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s pit bull, and now an MSNBC legal analyst.

However, according to Gerstein, “the memos indicate that the bulk of the information flow at the meeting went the other way, with the AP journalists providing the FBI with a bevy of facts the news organization uncovered during its inquiries into Manafort’s work and finances.” Gerstein also reported that “one of memos also says the purpose of the meeting was for the FBI to ‘obtain documents from the AP reporters,’ although it’s unclear any documents were shown or changed hands.” And “the memos also show that one of the AP journalists gave the FBI an unusual detail about a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia that Manafort used to keep records of his worldwide business dealings.

One journalism expert quoted by Gerstein, University of Maryland journalism professor Mark Feldstein, was “taken aback by the AP sharing the code with the FBI,” noting “neither side is supposed to share confidential information with the other, but in fact each often does — perhaps to seek corroboration, perhaps to get other confidential information back in exchange or perhaps to spur on the other side’s investigation.” One must wonder whether in the age of Trump this taboo no longer exists.

If so, that is not a legal concern: Journalists are free to serve as the FBI’s CHSs as much as they like, although one may then question how free the press feels to hold those same officials up to scrutiny. But a legal problem does arise if the media and the FBI maintain a closed circuit of intel, with the Department of Justice using press reports to “verify” FBI sources. We saw this phenomenon play out in the Page FISA applications when the DOJ relied on Steele’s supposed intel and then cited to media reports that Steele himself had sourced as corroboration.

Whether the IG’s report on the Page FISA applications delves into these issues is yet to be seen, but rather than speculate on what is to come, Americans should be outraged by what has already been reported.

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